How many times have I heard the question (and, ahem, usually from funders): It looks like fun, but are they learning? Because learning is never fun, right? And if you are having fun, your mind has checked out, yes?
But the science of learning would have it otherwise: We know that people learn when they are truly engaged—when they care, when they are intrigued, when they feel empowered to create, and when they feel a sense of joy and pleasure. This is what makes the arts such a powerful context for learning and why Wallace has a long tradition of funding in arts education.
To help guide our latest work and thinking about youth arts, we have commissioned a handful of studies over the past few years. One is by Erica Halverson, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how people learn in and through the arts. Her recent paper based on Wallace-commissioned work surfaces current trends and challenges in youth arts programs, particularly those serving young people from marginalized communities.
It’s my pleasure to share a recent conversation I had with Erica about how she approaches the arts and why youth arts can foster student learning, as well as learning about how people learn.
Bronwyn Bevan: You are one of the few learning scientists I know who works in the arts. How did that happen?
Erica Halverson: I have a personal and a professional answer. The personal answer is that I grew up participating in the National Dance Institute in New York. Jacques d’Amboise, who was a New York arts legend, first as a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet and then as a transformative arts educator through his founding of NDI, was my first mentor. That experience of making art as a part of a dance ensemble shaped everything about who I am. Later, when I moved to Chicago, I brought the values I developed at NDI into how I designed arts programs for young people. I wanted to create spaces to make beautiful and silly things with other young people.
The professional answer is that while designing these spaces I started to notice: “Oh, kids are learning things!” I became curious, because over and over again, classroom teachers would tell us about the kids participating in our arts programs, “Bronwyn has not said a word all year, and now I can't get her to stop talking.” Or, “I had no idea Bronwyn could write like that!” What was happening in these art making programs that seemed to be transformative for kids who we were told were not otherwise so engaged?
BB: And you happened to be living in Chicago at a time when the whole field of the Learning Sciences was taking off at Northwestern. The Learning Sciences is a field that blends psychology, cultural anthropology, cognitive sciences, and education to develop a systematic, evidence-based understanding of how people learn through designing and testing learning approaches in real life, with real people. But that early learning sciences research was so tech and science heavy. How did you approach researching the arts?
EH: I was lucky. Not only was there a learning sciences program right there, but there was a trailblazer faculty member—the great Dr. Carol Lee—who was exploring what it means to know and learn both cognitively and socio-culturally in the context of English Language Arts classrooms.
As a designer of youth arts programs, I've always come to research with an interest in understanding how art making works as a process.
BB: Can you say what you mean by cognitively and socio-culturally?
EH: Well, we all assume that learning involves cognition, meaning what’s going on “inside peoples’ heads,” but it also involves the social, cultural, and historical contexts and experiences of peoples’ lives—for example, students’ interests and identities, their peer groups, family practices, and mentors. Maybe because I didn't come to research from a research discipline, I was able to see both concepts as part of the landscape of knowing and learning. As a designer of youth arts programs, I've always come to research with an interest in understanding how art making works as a process. I try to design research studies that get into the fine-grained components of art-making processes.
BB: How fine is the grain?
EH: What I want to understand is like this: A kid tells a story in a group and then a bunch of other kids are like, “We're gonna make a scene out of that!”
How does that happen? What kinds of conversations are they having? What ideas do they jettison? What ideas do they keep? How do they understand what the art form is for and how do different art forms afford different ways of expressing the same kind of idea?
BB: The paper you recently published in the Arts Education Policy Review names four different practices you have found important to youth arts: Representation, Identity, Creativity, and Collaboration. Can you tell us more about them and how someone might use them?
EH: The four practices are the things that people do while art making. They can be understood as important learning practices in the arts and across other disciplines that we care about in schools. Over time, and with mentorship and/or instruction, these practices can become more refined, proficient, or innovative. The practices also generate specific kinds of learning outcomes that we value in terms of what it means to be a productive learner or a productive member of society.
When we are teaching somebody in a discipline, basically what we are doing is teaching them how to represent their understanding within the terms of the discipline: an equation, a haiku, a watercolor. And the arts are just super-duper good at it, because that's what art making is—making ideas visible or knowable.
BB: For example, what do you mean by “Representation”?
EH: Representation might be the closest to something we care about in school. Basically, all disciplinary learning in schools—math, English, history, science—is about understanding the relationship between the tools of the medium and how you use those tools to communicate an idea. For example, you can represent a rainbow using the tools of mathematics, science, language arts, or visual arts. When we are teaching somebody in a discipline, basically what we are doing is teaching them how to represent their understanding within the terms of the discipline: an equation, a haiku, a watercolor. And the arts are just super-duper good at it, because that's what art making is—making ideas visible or knowable. Artists and teaching artists understand that's what they're doing when they engage newcomers in an art-making space.
BB: Got it. What about the second practice: Identity, or identity-work?
EH: Identity is the practice that is most familiar to those of us who work and study in informal learning environments. Right? We talk and think often about how participating in non-school-based learning processes affords kids opportunities to understand how they see themselves, how other people see them, how they fit into communities.
BB: Right. The informal learning community has claimed identity, but I think the learning sciences show that identity work is fundamental to learning, period. In both formal and informal settings.
Of course, identity work is not unique to art making, but art making turns out to be a really productive space because art is personal.
EH: Yes. My kid, for example, is a humanities kid, but she's also a student. She has a student identity, and so she sort of sucks up the STEM thing, not because she's like “I'm a STEM person,” but because she's like, “I mean it's school and I'm school-affiliated.” Of course, identity work is not unique to art making, but art making turns out to be a really productive space because art is personal. And so young people, when they make art, build themselves into the stories, but they also build themselves into communities of practice—peers and adults.
BB: What about the third practice: Creativity?
EH: Creativity is one of those things that plays really well in circles that want to talk about what 21st century skills people need. It’s also lived in the psychology space for a long time. And, of course, people in the arts use it too. It may mean different things in different spaces. Mostly psychologists have studied and developed measures to identify what creativity is, and they see it as sort of dispositional—how a person thinks. We identify it as a practice so that it can be removed from the dispositional, but be less squishy than “I know it when I feel it.”
BB: Yes! Because in the end what you do matters much more than what you feel or think. I mean there’s a relationship, but there’s also a potentially significant gap between what people think is right and what people act on. So, practices are much more visible, feel-able, and accountable ways of understanding what’s going on.
But what I see, and what folks who work and live in these arts organizations say, is that collaboration is an important end goal in and of itself.
BB: And do you see the practices of collaboration related to what people describe as distributed cognition—where in order to get things done, like fly a jetliner, you actually need a lot of different people and tools doing some part of the work, but no one person or tool is doing all of the work?
EH: Distributed cognition is an excellent theoretical framing or explanatory mechanism for collaboration. We know that thinking and knowing is stretched across people and tools and time, so it makes sense that learning outcomes should be similarly distributed.
BB: Can we talk about the regional aspects of the study you did for Wallace? You looked at arts programs in the Urban Midwest, the Indigenous Southwest, on the Texas/Mexico border, and the Bay Area because, you argued, there are specific local histories and cultures that live on in the teaching artists, the programs, and the spaces that make up the youth arts program. You called this “the scene,” which I love.
EH: Yeah, I think when you ask, what does art making look like in a given program, it requires attention to social and cultural and historical space and time. Because representation is cognitive for sure, but it is also cultural, historical. By that I mean that any discipline—take natural science—has roots in a range of cultures, histories, and disciplines. What the concept of “alive” means in an elementary school science textbook is very different from what that concept means in a learning community on the Ojibwe Nation tribal lands. These different framings don’t really make sense outside of the context in which they are being used. With respect to the arts, this means understanding and valuing how art making happens in a particular place at a particular time, rather than imposing a set of values about what makes a “good” arts program. We saw this across all four of our “scenes”—from discussions of the importance of arts tools and practices “crossing borders” in Texas and Mexico to the history of urban development, redlining, and post-industrialism shaping what kinds of art young people learn to make in the Urban Midwest.
BB: Now for the killer closer question: What did you learn about measuring or documenting impacts of youth arts programs?
EH: Something that I heard a lot from arts leaders is that metrics like attendance can obscure the real participation trajectories of young people. One person even said, “Look, I know I've been successful when a kid comes once and I don't see them for a year, and then suddenly they come back. And then three years later, they're a mentor in a different program that’s like mine but not mine. That's success.” As she told me, “I don't know how you measure that, but it doesn't show up on an attendance sheet.” What does show up, though, is the capacity of arts organizations to keep kids coming back through the creation of learning experiences that center representation, identity, creativity, and collaboration.
